WWW founder-fathers: Tim Berners-Lee (left),
Robert Cailliau, and Ted Nelson after the Advisory Committee
meeting of the WWW Consortium, in Tokyo.

Bill Clinton, 42nd president of the United States:
"When
I took office [January 20, 1993], only high energy
physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide
Web.... Now even my cat has its own page." -- announcement
of Next Generation Internet initiative, 1996

We have spent a tremendous amount of time
over the last four or five years really crafting our external
e-business initiatives,-
IBM
e-commerce directorScott
Gannon

The key words that came to my mind while writing (and
DOING) this (WWW) history were: synergy,serendipity
andcoincidence. Ben Segal,
CERN

Andy Grove (right photo) summed up the online
pioneers' attitude when asked about the return on
investment (ROI) from his firm's Internet ventures:
"This is Columbus in the New World..."

... If you think you're living in a
revolutionary period now, wait till you start getting
unsolicited e-mail from the Bolsheviks or Mao, or find
yourself on Catherine the Great's home
page... World Wide Web will sound like an awfully
modest enterprise. You
laugh?

Don
Hoefler journalist is credited with coining the
phrase: "Silicon Valley" In 1971, in a series of articles that Hoefler
wrote for ELECTRONIC NEWS, a weekly tabloid, he first
used the phrase "SiliconValley" to describe the
congeries of electronics firms mushroomingin Santa Clara
county...

Silicon Valley is explosively expanding its
geographical borders. It was only a small part of
Palo-Alto 's Stanford University Park 50 years ago. It
has become one of the fastest growing regions of
California now.

And there will not be any
geographical borders for Silicon Valley's future,
because it's transforming itself to Internet
Valley, which is destroying any geographical limits
for the new kind of human being.

... even in those rare cases when the company employee signs an NDA in
exchange for a persuasive large monetary reward - even in this case - an
employer cannot, under the conditions of the state of California, create
legal barriers to an employee leaving to work for his employer's
competition.

This is one of the Great
ClassicWebsites. It's a history of the Internet and what led up
to it, told in hypertext, both eloquently and chaotically, as
strange in its own way as the Mel Brooks movie, History of the
World, Part One. But it's one [REDACTED} of a lot more accurate than
the Brooks movie. All Internet users, even those of you who just
signed up for Web-TV or AOL last week and are still fumbling around,
should check out this site.

When you jump into this online story,
make sure you have a couple of hours free. It takes that long to
read. Imagine a collaborative writing project that tells you
more than you ever wanted to know (and more than probably thought
there was to tell) about the Internet, starting with the laying of
the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic in 1858 (which was NOT
a success, BTW).

You'll learn why the WWW Consortium
[W3C] is based at a physics lab in Switzerland called CERN, instead
of at a computer research center where you'd logically expect it to
be, and why CERN doesn't even stand for the lab's real name -- in
either English or French, along with lots of other neat factoids
that'll come in handy if you ever find yourself playing Trivial
Pursuit: The Internet Edition.

by Robin
MillerBest High-Tech Sights on the Net

___

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History by
Gregory Gromov ... possibly not the first place in the
pool where a non-swimmer should take the plunge, this colorful and
quirky site can be a great resource where an informed ‘Net surfer
can come and let hypertext do the walking and the inventors of the
‘Net themselves do the talking.

"Nettalk : A Brief History of the
'Net" by Kelly WardThe Bulletin. Special Libraries
Association, San Francisco Bay region. The
School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) -- a
graduate program at the University of California,
Berkeley.

Finally, an entertaining and eye-catching
approach to Internet history is Gregory R. Gromov's History of
Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History. This
site is worth visiting, as much for its unorthodox approach using
dazzling visuals and hypertext style as its content. By
Deborah Husted Koshinsky and Rick
McRae, University Libraries

This is an entertaining (if
potentially confusing) account of Net history, part of a large
on-line hyperbook ... this site will provide some
fascinating insights and connections between events and
people.

Open Learning Agency :
learning resources to support the K-12 education system in British
Columbia, Canada

___

... This is a hypertext ... It
is written as a kind of mosaic rather than as a straight narrative,
including email questions and answers, fragments of interviews, and
the like. It focuses primarily on the Web and hypertext over the
Internet.

by M. C. Morgan College of
Arts and Letters,

Bemidji State University, MN,
USA

The Roads
and Crossroads of Internet History - Gregory Gromov's comprehensive and
fascinating overview of the philosophy and history of the
Internet.

The Roads and
Crossroads of Internet History by Gregory Gromov ... can be a great
resource where an informed ‘Net surfer can come and let hypertext do
the walking and the inventors of the ‘Net themselves do the talking.

by Kelly Ward, Public
Health Library, University of California, Berkeley

___

For anyone who has ever
wondered how and why the Internet was created comes this extensive
essay, "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet's
History." With this document, users can follow the development
of the Net from its early stages as a military communication system
to the multimedia extravaganza we know today.

The Roads and
Crossroads of Internet 's History by Gregory R. Gromov... is an
excellent history of the internet and a good example of a "web
document." ... You also should experience what "hypertext" is and
why this experience is more like exploring than reading...

Introduction for EDU 606 'School of Education' by Robert Melczarek

Troy State University, Dothan. USA

History of the Internet. We
all need it. We all want it. Buthow did it happen
in the first place? Gregory Gromov provides a ... comprehensive ...
history of the Worldwide Web before it was the Net we all know and
love. By Matthew Holt.

NetworkWorld.
June, 1997

_____

For a history of the
Internet readers should consult Gregory Gromov's The Roads and
Crossroads of the Internet's History.Humanities Computing Unit of Oxford
University,